


The Flexible Concept of Tomorrow

by finisterre



Category: Doctor Who (2005), The X-Files
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-21
Updated: 2010-11-21
Packaged: 2017-10-13 07:53:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,244
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/134915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/finisterre/pseuds/finisterre
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five Times Donna Noble Remembers Meeting That Bloke With The Stupid Name (And One Time She Doesn't)<br/>~<br/>or<br/>~<br/>Five Times Fox Mulder Remembers Meeting That Other Redhead (And One Time He Doesn't)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Flexible Concept of Tomorrow

He hadn’t thought of the strange woman with the red hair in years. Yet since he had the heart attack and moved into The Willows, all he has is time to remember: cases and places; the odd things he’s seen; people lost and loved. Scully.

So one day — after dinner but before Amelia comes to check he’s okay for the night — he draws it all out on sheets from a legal pad. There are red, blue and green pens, footnotes, and a timeline held together with tape, for Christ’s sake. But even when it’s done he feels as though there’s something missing.

It’s a good job Amelia won’t be here for another ten minutes. She would lose her mind if she saw him sitting on the floor like a child with a coloring book. Assisted living, they call it, but it’s more like having a strict babysitter. He’s lucky, because he needs only minimal help, he still has all his marbles and he’s pretty spry for an old guy. He keeps himself to himself, the occasional visit from Will aside. There’s not much to nag him about. And he likes Amelia, with her strawberry blonde hair, shy flirting and ridiculous giggle.

He hauls his aching bones off the rug. He wishes Scully were here to see this. First, she’d mock him and then she’d help him figure out all the parts he’d left out. All his life, redheads laughing at him. How he misses it now.

He pushes his glasses back on his nose, leans on the mantlepiece next to the photograph of Scully that smirks at his idiocies every day, and surveys his work from six feet up. He hasn’t seen her for more than thirty years but his strange brand of intuition is insistent that he’s going to see her again.

It turns out he is right. The last time Fox Mulder meets Donna Noble is the day before he dies.

* * *  
 **I - "Now is the time for all good men…"**

The first time he remembers seeing her, they’re almost the same age.

Something huge slamming down from the sky just caused a blast wave that knocked him clear off his feet. The bridge is so much floating matchwood and ahead, a fireball consumes the center of a densely packed wood. He walks towards the crash site, flashlight in one hand, gun in the other, one part scared to five parts thrilled at the thought of seeing a ship at last.

He catches a glimpse of red hair ahead of him and just for a moment, his spirits leap at the thought that Scully pushed aside her objections and came out here after all. As he gets closer he realizes that the woman isn’t Scully. She’s about five inches too tall, longer hair, more broadly built and the jacket’s brown leather. There’s something vaguely familiar about her. She’s also walking very fast in the wrong direction, her breath blowing out in white clouds as she labors up the hill.

"Ma’am," he calls out. She turns around. She’s older than Scully, with a scowl on her narrow face. She’s muttering under her breath. "Ma’am, I need you to move away from the crash site. It could be dangerous."

"Should’ve known you’d be here, Mulder," she says, in an accent he immediately identifies as from London. "Great big trouble magnet, you are; just like him."

"How do you know my name?" he asks, the hairs on the back of his neck prickling.

"As if I’m going to forget a name like yours," she says. "I mean, seriously — Fox? What were your parents thinking? Child abuse, that is."

"We’ve met before?"

"Well, duh," she exclaims. "I’m hardly going to just guess your name is ‘Fox’, am I?"

He’s bewildered and speechless for a second, his mouth hanging open, then says: "Ma’am?"

"And cheers for the save, by the way," she says giving him a big smile. "Can’t remember if I said thank you last time."

"Thank you for what?" She starts her determined stomp up the hill again. He takes off after her: "Ma’am I can’t allow you to put yourself in danger."

She turns around, walking backwards. "Tough. And don’t you dare call me ma’am again."

"I’m ordering you to stop!" He can’t believe that just came out of his mouth.

"Order away, sunshine!" she yells. "You can’t make me."

"Did you notice I have a gun?"

She rolls her eyes. "Is it in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?"

Okay, now he feels pathetic. She turns around again, walking still faster. He’s about to try to catch up when a running man brushes past his shoulder. He’s as tall as Mulder but skinnier, his long brown coat flapping behind him like a batcape. In one hand he carries something metallic green and machined into planes and curves, like a mutant auto part.

"Donna! Got it!" the man yells triumphantly. He grabs her hand.

"About bloody time," the woman — Donna — says, suddenly sounding cheerful. "Come on, then, let’s get the poor sod back in the air before anyone finds him."

They start running towards the crash site and even though Mulder follows, they lose him in the trees inside a minute. Twenty minutes after that, there’s another blast of wind that nearly knocks him to the ground and a triangular ship hovers for a moment, casting green light across the forest, then disappears with the telltale crack of something that has gone from zero to Mach One in no time flat.

The army shows up ten minutes later but he doesn’t tell them about the couple on the hill. He suspects that’s mostly because even he can’t quite believe it.

Scully rescues him from the lock-up two hours after that. "Ball lightning," she says. "It caused a flash fire."

"All that scorched earth from ball lightning? Are you insane? It was a ship!"

"Shut up and get in the car, Mulder."

Fury blazes behind that tight-lipped facade but he’s focused on something else: that she came after him, even though she thought he was wrong. Perhaps this one might stick around.

* * *  
 **II - "Smile, sunshine"**

The first time Donna meets him, he’s older than she is.

The first Clinton is in the White House, the Spice Girls are in the charts, the Yankees have just swept the Padres to win the World Series, and even Scully is professing to like baseball — and him — just a little.

A warehouse in Newark. Reports of strange blue lights in the sky, a shrieking in the night, and six men found dead in nine days, with missing limbs and ragged chunks torn from their torsos as if something fierce and toothy were snacking on them. The victims are linked to the mob in four of the six cases, so naturally Scully suggests it’s a Mafia warning.

As if the Mob would warn transgressors by making it look as though velociraptors were doing the killing. Are their enemies sleeping with the plesiosaurs?

Scully is deeply unimpressed with this sarcasm, there’s a harsh exchange of words and that is why he is alone in the warehouse right now, like an idiot.

There’s an unnatural soupy quality to the darkness, as though it’s filled with thick smoke, and a fetid stench, like rotting flesh with a topnote of blocked drains. His flashlight won’t reach the corners of the hangar. A sudden deafening noise like the tearing of metal sends him crashing against the wall, his heart pounding like a Gene Krupa drum solo. He can hear thudding footsteps, the scritch of long claws on concrete. He finds an alcove and edges into it so he can see what the hell is making that horrific sound without it seeing him.

If cars felt pain as they were crushed into scrap metal, they would scream like that.

"Stay close!" a man yells in the distance.

"How can I when I can’t even see your skinny arse five feet in front of me?" a woman shouts back. "Slow down."

"Can’t! Perception clouds are tricky. Stay close or we’ll lose each other."

There’s another roar, still nearer, and a shriek about ten feet away. The scritch of claws turns into a loud scrape and thump of something with huge feet, approaching faster and faster. Jesus, the *ground* is shaking. He sees someone hurtling towards him, a woman. Someone with a sharp face, and wavy red hair streaming out behind. Further back, but gaining on her, is something dark, something vast.

Scarcely thinking, he reaches out, catches her arm and swings her into his alcove. The creature pounds past their hiding place, trailing a foul sulphuric fug in its wake. She hits the wall next to him and rebounds off it into a heap, backpack skidding to hit his feet.

It was almost five years ago but his memory is excellent. "Donna?" he whispers in astonishment, stretching out a hand to help a tallish figure in a leather jacket and hoop earrings pick herself up off the floor.

"Who’re you?" she asks shakily, brushing the dirt off her jeans. She hasn’t changed from that night in the forest where she knew his name. Actually, it’s weird, she doesn’t look different at all. Even her hair is the same.

"Fox Mulder."

"Fox? For serious?" She tries to laugh but she’s still catching her breath. "Nah. What’s your name really?"

He drags out his ID, shines his flashlight on it. "See?" he says.

She frowns. "That’s child abuse, that."

"You said that last time," he replies in excitement, "you remember?"

"Oh, I’d’ve remembered a lanky great drink of water like you," she says, looking at him in frank appreciation. "So, Mister FBI Agent, you going to tell me how you know my name?"

"We’ve met. We were near McKevitt, maybe five years ago. You must remember — a goddamned *spaceship* came down from the sky!"

She looks at him, a bit blank. "When you say spaceship, what are we talking about? Was it, like, a rocket, or a sort of…" she gestures with her hands, "saucer-y interstellar carrier, or a little shuttle-y thing?"

He stares. "You’re kidding me, right?"

"Donna Noble, this is not a time for introductions!" a voice shouts. "I need the Radolus Box and some light, right now."

"Yeah, yeah," she yells into the black. "Keep your bloody hair on, spaceman!"

"NOW."

She sighs and looks Mulder up and down. "I never get to just appreciate the scenery. Enjoy the view."

There’s a piercing flash of blue light and that metallic howling far closer than he would like. Drawing in a scared breath, Donna picks up her backpack and squares her shoulders for a fight. "Right, then."

She pulls a silver-grey square out of her back pocket and it flips open like some Star Trek-style communicator, the top screen bursting into life with a picture of sunflowers, numbered buttons on the bottom half lined in blue light. He realises it’s some kind of advanced cellphone. She points it at him.

"Oi! Smile, sunshine."

A flash goes off and he blinks. "Sometimes you’ve got to take the scenery with you," she says with a grin.

"If it comes near you," she adds, pointing at his flashlight, "switch your torch off and on. It hates sudden changes in light. It paralyzes it. Its eyes can’t cope with it."

"What’s ‘it’?" he says. "Donna, wait, who is ‘it’?"

But she’s already shuffling towards where the man’s voice came from. She points the phone out into the darkness. The flashbulb is like a firework in the inky black and there’s another roar from the creature.

"Again," shouts the man. There’s a blast of tinny alien-sounding music filled with handclaps and yelps, nothing he recognizes.

"Damn it!" she snaps, "Sorry, wrong button. Flaming Nokias." The music cuts off and there’s another camera flash.

Another long, roaring scream is bitten off as a bright blaze of blue light fills the warehouse. When it goes dark again, it is the normal shadow-ridden darkness of anywhere on Earth. Moonlight is coming in through the tiny high windows by the roof. He can just make out two figures standing by a small box on the floor, high-fiving each other. But by the time he makes his way over to where they were standing, they’ve already gone.

It’s not until five years later, when he decides that Scully doesn’t dance enough and waltzes her round the kitchen to songs from the radio, that he recognizes the music from the phone again — _"Hey Ya"_ — and has the thrill of knowing for sure that he met honest to god *time travellers*.

* * *  
 **III - Dice and the universe**

A Utah jail cell is the last place Mulder expects to see her again.

It’s only three weeks since his mother killed herself. Three weeks since he found out that his sister had died before he had even started looking for her properly. Scully has been trying to keep him close by her ever since, afraid his fragile sense of peace wouldn’t last.

She was right, but he hates the way she can’t help but hover over him. Worse still is being spied on for signs that he is cracking. He needs to be busy, which is why he fled on an early plane this morning while she was stuck testifying in a Baltimore courtroom. He’s not a complete ass about it: he left a message on her cellphone before he switched his off.

Frohike gave him the location of a small base — he’s kind of fuzzy on where right now, which is worrying — where the guys suspected records were being kept. They’d told him it would be quiet but instead there’s some kind of alert going on, and the place is bristling with guards. He’d managed to sneak into one of the labs and then, nothing. Someone has taken what felt like a baseball bat to his head. They have to hold him upright to walk him into their cells and there’s blood sliding down the back of his neck, soaking the collar of his shirt.

He hears her first, an echoing bellow down the corridor. "Oi! Chunky! You look like a man who knows where the fridge is. What about a sandwich? I’m bloody starving down here!"

There’s more shouting somewhere ahead of him, and he sees a smeary figure behind the dirty plexiglass walls of the cell. "Up yours too, lardboy!" a woman shouts. There’s a flicker of recognition in his mind.

They throw him into the holding cell, and he stays on the floor for a minute, waiting for the room to stop shifting around him.

"Oh my God," says the voice. "Mulder, isn’t it?"

One hand goes to his shoulders. "Can you stand?"

He shakes his head, which was foolish. The pain screams from the back of his scalp as she touches it with her fingertips. She swears in a low, fluent torrent. "You’re in a bad way. I’ll get help." He flinches as she yells again, hitting the thick plexiglass with the flat of her hand. "Oi, you lot! He needs a doctor!"

She grabs his forearm to help him off the floor and Mulder tries to haul himself to his feet. The room tips like a rowboat on a lake and he is spectacularly sick all over someone’s blue sneakers.

"Bollocks," she mutters, puts her hands in his armpits and pulls him upright. She drags him to the cot furthest away from the vomit splatter, sits him down, then toes off her soiled sneakers, picks them up with a dainty thumb and forefinger and tosses them into the far corner. They’re followed by a pair of soaked black socks.

"Sorry," he says woozily, keeling over so he can lie down. "Sorry. Airport breakfast. Lots of coffee."

"Shhh, don’t matter. Never liked those shoes much, even if they are good for running. Felt like copying."

There is a long interlude of yelling as she tries to get him a doctor. Or the doctor; she says both, but no one comes. It degenerates into threats and aspersions cast on the guards’ morality, parentage, competence and general hygiene. He’s not sure how it helps but it seems to make her feel better.

Eventually she flops down next to him and proffers a small white tablet which turns out to be mint gum rather than the painkiller he craves. He chews for a few minutes, until his head hurts too much for even that sort of movement, then makes a small stalactite of it under the bed.

Scully is going to kill him for running away and this wondrous cat’s cradle of an understanding they’ve been building will be entangled. It’ll be months before she’ll let him kiss her again; that’s how furious she’s going to be.

Apparently he said this last part out loud. "I bet she will. I bloody would," Donna says, calm now. There’s a hand stroking his hair. Not the hand he wants but a comforting hand nonetheless. "Come on, sweetheart. You can’t go to sleep, not with a concussion. Talk to me."

Over the next few hours he talks and talks and he doesn’t seem to have many filters — perhaps it’s because she’s very good at impertinent questions. He tells her about Scully, about his sister, about how all he ever wanted to do as a kid was see the universe, but the aliens are not friendly, and the humans are worse.

She tells him about worlds where peaceful beings communicate in song, giant plants compose drum sonatas and of a human empire at peace and stretching across the stars. Either she lives in a fantasy world so baroquely detailed it makes Lord of the Rings look like The Hungry Caterpillar or she’s telling the truth. He wants to believe she is.

"Why do we keep meeting, do you think?" he asks her.

"I think maybe it’s all about patterns," she says. "My grandad says that God does not play dice with the universe."

He laughs, and wishes he hadn’t. "Your grandad is Einstein?"

"No, you prawn, he likes the quote," she says, smiling. "Everything happens for a reason. Sometimes for reasons we can’t see. We just need to find out what they are."

Isn’t that the story of his life?

He’s just clinging on to consciousness with the last of his willpower when he hears her hiss, "And where the hell have you been, you useless bloody Martian?"

"Perspective, Donna. It’s only been a couple of hours — well, all right, seven — but I had a whole computer system to crash and burn." He opens his eyes to see her tall, skinny friend — the Doctor — outside the cell door.

"Nice cell you have here," the Doctor says and points at the mess on the floor, his eyes narrowing in concern. "Not so keen on the floor art, though. Not yours, I hope."

"His," says Donna. "We’ve got to get him out of here."

A blue light glows around the lock and the cell door swings open. After that his memories are like short clips of fuzzy video.

There’s a long walk balanced between Donna and her friend, his arms draped around their necks like scarves, her bare feet slapping on the cold concrete floors.

A big room like an undersea cavern.

Something too hot for comfort on the back of his head but everywhere it touches, it takes a worse pain away.

Donna saying, "Where’s home for you, sweetheart?"

A strange, loud scraping, wheezing sound and a flashing light that hurts his eyes.

The next thing, there are hands on his chest. "Mulder?"

He cracks open one eye, and there’s Scully limned by the dim reading lamp. He’s in her bed, under the covers, fully dressed, his head resting on a dark blue towel on top of her white pillows. She’s leaning over him, wide-eyed in alarm, her right hand on the pulse point in his neck. "Mulder, there’s dried blood all over your shirt. Where are you hurt?"

"Back of my head," he says, propping himself up on one elbow. She slides behind him, sitting on the bed. Her deft fingers part his hair, looking for damage, pressing where there should be an ugly tear in his scalp.

"There’s more dried blood but I can’t see anything. There’s no injury I can find. Get your shirt off."

"Now I know there’s been this whole kissing thing but that’s a little forward, don’t you think?" he teases. He feels remarkably good, if confused as to how he got here.

"Mulder," she growls, pressing her hand down his spine now, feeling for a wound. "You said you were in Utah. I was all ready to come after you and kick your ass."

He reaches back for her hand and pulls it into both of his. Their eyes meet and he sees her concern relax into affection. He strains up and kisses her. It’s chaste at first but he can tell the exact moment when she sets aside her desire to rip him a new one for scaring her in favor of deepening the kiss. Her tongue tip traces the crease of his lips until he lets her in, her hand caressing the back of his head, still cautious. He feels a happy kind of dizziness but no pain.

"How did you get into my bed?" she asks, dazed and slightly slurring her words, as he pulls away.

I wished really hard, he thinks.

"Some friends dropped me home," he says, with a half-smile

* * *  
 **IV - Missing persons**

  
The next time he sees Donna Noble is in London, 2010.

He is finally a free man, with a slightly stained character and a passport in his own name again. He decides to make good on a promise he made himself a decade ago, the first time he saw the glorious pale arc of Scully’s naked back in his bed. He had a fantasy then that she was coming to England with him. He was going to get her naked, in a crop circle, and — as a prelude to some serious fun — run his fingers down her vertebrae from her neck to her ass like a pianist playing the greatest glissando in history.

In the end he substituted the crop circles for a bed and breakfast near Avebury — hell, they’re not in their twenties any more and there are places itchy straw should not _ever_ go. Now he’s showing her the sights of London in the summer. They are staying in an apartment out west, by the river, with a bed the size of Times Square.

This, then, is happiness; this is walking in the light.

They’ve run out of milk so he kisses Scully on the cheek and tells her he’ll be five minutes. He jogs down to the High Street, with its spread of late-night convenience stores, cafes and rowdy pubs. He picks up a carton of milk and some of that expensive dark chocolate she has a love-hate relationship with, and is on his way back when he catches a glimpse of red hair. There’s something about red hair that always makes him take a second look, even now, when Scully is not 10 minutes away watching News 24 and waiting for him.

"Hey!" he yells. "Donna?"

It’s definitely her. She doesn’t look any different than the last time he saw her ten years ago, not a day older, and that sets off sparks of delight in him. She’s a _time traveller_.

Maybe he could find out how she did it, how she kept touching his life like a flat stone skimmed across water. He imagines taking Scully to meet her: finally someone who could understand that senior thesis because she’d lived part of it. It would be proof. Argue your way out of that one, Scully.

Donna’s talking into that tiny phone of hers, the picture-taking, music-playing device that seemed so amazing in 1998 and is now commonplace, even a little old-fashioned.

"Donna!"

She turns around, and there’s no recognition in her eyes at all. He calls her name again. "Veena, can I call you back?" she says. "Yeah. I _know_. Laters."

"Can I help you?" she asks with brisk politeness.

He smiles broadly. "Hey. It’s me," he says.

"And who’s me?"

"Fox Mulder."

She snorts. "Fox? Seriously?"

He laughs. "That’s the third time you’ve said that to me."

"Nah, sorry," she says, backing away. "I think you’ve got the wrong person."

"Your name is Donna Noble. You travel with this guy, he’s called the Doctor. I never got his second name. We shared a jail cell in Utah, 10 years ago. You were at a warehouse in New Jersey, and you captured a monster. You were at a UFO crash site in West Virginia in 1993 and you looked then exactly like you look now."

"Listen, sunshine, in 1993 I was 21 and working as a travel rep in Magaluf. And I’ve never been to anywhere in America but Orlando and it was shit. You’re thinking of someone else." She turns to leave.

"You travelled in time!" he cries. "I saw it."

She turns to look at him with mingled contempt and fear. "You’ve lost the plot, mate."

She stalks away. He is confounded. He’s certain it’s the same woman. She even has the same name. "Wait a second. Donna! Wait!"

He puts a hand on her shoulder, but she shrugs him off as violently as she can. "Get off me, you nutter, before I call the police," she says in a low growl, striding away. "I’ve never seen you before in my life."

"I’m on your phone! You took a picture of me!" he calls.

She doesn’t turn around again, but she’s jabbing at the buttons on the phone as she stalks away. She looks back just once, afraid, then hurries off down the street.

He stands and watches her until she disappears into the crowds, the disappointment like a bitter taste on his tongue.

* * *  
 **V - A stone skipping across water**

  
He’s clearing away the colored pens and wondering whether to just toss his old man’s folly of a timeline in the bin when there’s a sursurration in the air. Sheets of paper blow off the table, the drapes billow against the closed windows. Washes of pale light flow over the walls. There’s a wheezing sound he heard once before, which fades in and out in time with the beating of his poor overworked heart. He can feel the adrenaline flowing again, like the old days.

He walks into his bedroom. There’s a high, narrow mahogany closet covered with carved runes where once there was a shadowy empty corner. Pale blue light seeps from inside where tiny holes decorate the most beautiful of the carvings. He’d thought he was too old and had seen too much to be surprised ever again but he’s glad he’s wrong. He puts his glasses on and runs his fingers over what feels like wood, warm and grained to the touch. A subtle energy hums through it. There’s a moment of stillness, before the door opens with a movie soundtrack creak.

A tall redheaded woman steps out of the wardrobe. She’s thirty years younger than him now, early forties or so. She’s acquired a shabby elegance with that extra decade since he last saw her, a tailored black suit emphasizing her curves and an enormous, dark gray greatcoat, like a soldier’s, trailing down to her ankles — a little like the trenchcoats Scully once wore. Her red hair is swept up into a neat chignon. There’s also something about her eyes that throws him off-balance, something distant and knowing. She recognises him this time but he’s not sure he entirely recognises her.

"Donna Noble," he says. "Tell me you didn’t just get back from Narnia."

"Smartarse." She gives him a slow burn of a smile.

"Always," he says. "You remember me now?"

Her face becomes serious. "Do you remember me? This me?"

Suddenly he does and it all falls into place. "Why now?" he breathes.

"It’s time," she says.

* * *

  
 **VI - Cupboard space**

The first time Mulder meets Donna Noble he is 32 years old, it’s fall and the days are endless, stretched gray.

A cold, wet Tuesday evening, end of October; a badly lit, near empty hotel bar at almost ten o’clock. It has been eleven weeks, three days and — he checked his watch an hour ago — four hours since Scully was last seen bloody but alive on the grainy surveillance footage from a state trooper’s camera. The case isn’t closed, but that’s about the best you can say of it. There’s no one else to interview, no more footage to scour, no square yard of the crime scene left unexamined. Sometimes you can honestly say there’s nothing more you can do. Believing it is another matter.

On nights like this he thinks about putting his gun in his mouth and just making it all _stop_. His fantasies on the subject are detailed, disturbing, recurring. They include the way the taste of the metal makes his tongue curl as though he were licking a battery and the letter he would write absolving his parents before he untethered himself from this life. Then, blessed nothingness.

But he can’t give up. He’s never been able to just let go.

He’s in Pittsburgh; another warm body to throw at one of the biggest manhunts in the city’s history. A girl of fifteen is the third young woman to be abducted in three months and they’re pretty sure they’ve linked the cases to unsolved homicides in Cleveland and Akron. The killer murders within three days of taking a victim; Angie O’Riley has been gone four. They’re working fifteen hour days and it’s not enough. It never is.

The guys on the taskforce — and particularly his boss, Dutton — are kind to him; they’ve all heard the story about how Fox Mulder got the son of a bitch who killed his partner, he just didn’t get the location of the body. Somehow they missed the memo from Patterson that Mulder was an untrustworthy flake. He has their wary respect.

He is trying his best to be useful in return but he has spent weeks subsisting on dribs and drabs of sleep. His brain won’t switch off. Sport news won’t do it and even porn — usually his favorite vicarious thrill — has failed him. He runs for miles, but that only buys him a couple of exhausted hours. If he closes his eyes, he sees her gravestone, newly carved, or worse, imagines her in pain. He is running on caffeine and willpower, and he isn’t too sure about the willpower.

Something catches his eye and he wonders if there’s ever going to be a moment when his heart doesn’t seize in his chest at a glimpse of a woman with red hair in a crowd. As though she senses him looking, she turns around. It’s a tallish woman, maybe five eight, looks to be a decade or so older than him but wearing it well. Long curly hair; nice rack under a simple, low-cut, dark blue dress; long, elegant legs. Strange coat though, it’s thick grey wool and too big for her, like an army-issue greatcoat — something you’d wear to invade Russia, not to pick up guys in bars. She catches his eye and he ducks his head but she comes over anyway.

"I’m not really looking for company," he tells her as kindly as he can.

She slings that coat over the back of the stool next to his. "I know," she says, putting one cold hand over his and giving it a brief squeeze. He opens his mouth to object and then realizes that aside from one disastrous Californian interlude in late summer, it’s been months since anyone touched him with care or thought.

She orders two whiskies and water — which is his drink when he *does* drink. "Get that down you."

"Why are you buying me drinks?"

"Drink, singular," she says. "You look like you need one. God knows I do."

"Have we met before?"

"Not yet, Mulder."

"You know my name?"

She grins. "Hard to forget it. I’m a fan of your work."

"You’re a fan of wiretapping? That’s an obscure interest."

"No, smartarse. Your work on extraterrestrial intelligence; I read your articles for Omni."

"They were pseudonymous."

"M.F. Luder isn’t exactly the Enigma code," she says. "I was sorry to hear about your partner."

He takes a long pull of whiskey. "Yeah, well…" he says.

"I met her once," she says. "You’d been gone for a bit."

"But we were only partnered for a year," he replies, frowning.

She pulls a face, as though she’s made a faux pas. "Right. Of course. Should’ve remembered that. Bit new at this lark."

‘New at what, picking up guys in bars?’ he thinks, but lets the remark pass. "So how come you knew I was here?"

"I’m consulting." She brings out a wallet like his own ID and flashes it at him. It says she’s working for Interpol.

Two things unsettle him: the first is that he could swear the paper *wriggled* before the ID photo appeared; the second is that he can’t remember her name a minute after seeing it.

* * *

She’s easy to talk to. They chat about London — he spent most of one summer in the British Library as he started the third year of his PhD — and his belief in extraterrestrials, which she questions with one corner of her mouth turned up, as though she’s thought of ten smart aleck things to say but has decided to keep her own counsel. She states that she used to be a skeptic about alien life and now she’s a believer, but doesn’t explain the change. She makes him laugh.

Before he knows it the bartender is sweeping up around them and there are chairs on the tables. "Come on," the woman says, sliding off the barstool and slinging her long coat on in a flowing, practiced movement. "These lovely people have homes to go to."

Mulder knows that the instant he crosses the lobby to his room, the cold air from outside is going to wake him up like a shot of double espresso and then it’ll be another night of ceiling gazing. He’s not sure he can stand six more hours of being left with his own thoughts and she seems to be interested in him. "You want to come to my room, abuse the minibar?" he blurts out. "Courtesy of the US government?"

Her gaze is assessing, but she smiles. "All right then."

The walk makes him realise he is kind of drunk for the first time in years. He almost stumbles over the edge of a carpet until she catches his arm and keeps him upright. Very suave. His room is featureless and a depressing shade of oatmeal but at least he’s kept it neat. He opens the fridge door and stares for a moment or two until his tired eyes focus. "We have vodka, white rum, whisky and two kinds of beer that probably taste like horse piss," he says. "A bunch of mixers. You got any preference?"

He turns around and sees her sitting on the unused spare bed in his room, his case notes in front of her. She’s flipping past the pages too fast for her to be reading them, wincing at the photographs of previous victims. He strides over to her. "Hey, don’t; even if you are consulting, I need some kind of authorization." He plucks the thick file from her hands and puts it in the one drawer that locks, throws the key into his briefcase and slams that shut so the lock engages.

"Bit of overkill, there, mate," she says, amused rather than offended. She puts both hands behind her and leans back, toeing off her high-heeled shoes. "Whiskey and water. Easy on the water."

"What’s with the coat?" he asks.

"Pockets," she replies. "You always need decent pockets if you’re going to travel."

"You could take it off, if you’re staying." She raises an eyebrow but takes it off and slings it over the back of a chair.

He mixes their drinks, at war with himself. On the one hand he’s not sure he wants some kind of meaningless fuck. On the other hand, he would welcome the temporary oblivion. She’s got a few years on him but he’s always liked older women. They are surer, more assertive. He’s not the one in control here, for all that she’s in his room, and that’s a relief. He’ll go wherever she takes him; he doesn’t have the energy for anything else.

He sits next to her on the bed. As she talks, he wonders again what her name is; it’s embarrassing to admit he’s forgotten.

"And so I joined West Ham and we won the FA Cup final three-nil — me, Liberace and Henry the Eighth scored."

"What?"

"What are you like?" she asks, knocking back the last of her drink. "You were miles away."

He gives a sheepish grin. "Sorry. You want another?"

"Best not," she says, apparently as sober as she was when they first met. There’s a silence, as though she’s waiting for something. Her head tips to one side as she examines his face.

"What?"

One hand goes to his left cheek, the pads of her fingers awakening every nerve ending in the shell of his ear. She swipes a thumb across the dark semi-circle under his eye and he blinks a couple of times in surprise. "You’re so tired," she murmurs. "You poor sod."

"Not too tired for this," he says but it’s more a valiant effort than a convincing argument. Lust is only just winning its war with lethargy.

She laughs softly. With the lightest pressure from her fingers she guides him forward and kisses him. The press of her lips is colder than he imagined, and gentle as the swipe of a feather. He closes his eyes and opens his mouth slightly and she leans into the kiss. She tastes of the mellow smoky burn of the liquor. He puts the broad span of one hand on the side of her ribcage, moves it up towards her breasts.

"You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to plant one on you," she says, but moves out of his reach.

"Did I disappoint?" he asks, trying to cover his confusion.

"Nah, not at all," she says, dark blue eyes merry and a sweetly dirty smile on her face. "No complaints. But that’ll do, I reckon."

She shuffles closer again, undoing his loosened tie and putting it onto the bedside table, then starts in on the buttons of his shirt. He reaches across to her blouse but her hand stills his. "No. Let me do this," she says, but it’s not seductive, it’s more like the tone you would use to coax a sleepy, unwilling child to behave — and it’s pretty effective at making him compliant, banking his arousal to mere embers. He has no idea where this is going.

She drapes his shirt over a chair and turns to face him again. Her hands lift up towards his face but she halts them a few inches away from his cheeks. He looks in alcohol-fuzzed bewilderment. "May I?" He agrees and she takes his face in her hands. His eyes slide shut, without him ever deciding to do it.

"I think I know a way I can get you some sleep. Will you trust me?" He finds himself nodding within the cage of her spread fingers. Strangely he does. There’s a sixth sense that usually saves him when he pays attention to it. It’s quiet now. All he can feel is how cool her hands are against the alcohol flush of his cheeks, how gentle.

There’s the lightest pressure, like the popping of his ears when a plane descends, but inside his skull. Unbidden, he sees Scully in the trunk of the car, bloody and scared, then just as swiftly the memory is replaced by one of her smiling at one of his jokes. Then his sister, unconscious, suspended in an unearthly light and his muscles are locked, the lack of movement agonizing as his brain screams —

"What the hell are you doing?" He opens his eyes and scrambles back away from her on the bed.

She sighs, looking disappointed. "Trying to help."

"Who are you?"

"A friend. I promise." He doesn’t sense any kind of threat from her but there’s something golden behind her eyes that’s faraway and strange, and it scares him.

"Tell me what you were doing." He has his hands up in front of him, as though trying to ward her off, without even noticing he’s doing it.

She stands up and walks over to the greatcoat, draped over the chair. From one pocket she pulls out a penknife, and his heartbeat accelerates. He calculates just how long it will take him to scramble across to his gun and pull it from the holster.

But she opens out the knife and runs the blade across the base of her thumb, then closes it and throws it into one of the pockets of her coat. She lifts her hand. A crimson line stands proud of the skin. "See? Red blood," she says. "Earth-born."

"How would you know I was expecting anything else?" he asks, trying to swallow down his alarm.

"I told you. I’m an admirer of your work. I know who you fear." His skepticism must show in his face. She sighs. "Look, let me tell you the absolute truth. This is an unstable node. The fate of this segment of time depends on you not doing something careless and idiotic in the next 24 hours. I am here to stop you from doing that."

"Like… time travel?" He blinks a couple of times and presses the heel of one hand into his eyes in turn. When the flares clear, she’s still there. Nodding.

"Bullshit. I don’t believe you." His voice is hollow and cracks, because he’s lying.

She chuffs out an unhappy laugh. "Finally. Something you don’t believe."

"Tell me what you were doing."

She pulls a face. "Skinny britches is much better at explanations than me but I’ll give it a go. Imagine your memories are like a vast cupboard. Everything stored away where you can find it. Just now, you’re keeping all the memories that can hurt you most right at the front of the cupboard, where they disturb you. Stop you sleeping.

"You need to keep them in the back of the cupboard with the gravy salt and the glace cherries and the bloody awful brandy that’s only fit for sauce at Christmas. Not take them away — God, I would never do that — just, well, give you a little bit of distance. That way you can get some sleep and deal with them later, when you’re on more of an even keel."

She’s studying his expression, and evidently she doesn’t like what she sees. "That didn’t make any sense at all, did it?"

He shakes his head.

"Home economics analogies — Jesus wept," she says. "No wonder the Doctor sounds like a nutter. This stuff is impossible to explain and I'm still a bit new at all this."

She sucks the blood off her palm and presses on the cut, which now looks more like a scratch.

"You’re saying that if I sleep, I alter the course of history?" he says, tentatively.

"Yes!" she says, brightening and pointing at him with both hands in triumph. "You’ve got it."

"That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard."

She throws back her head and laughs. "Innit, though?" After a moment she sobers. "The causal nexus is a bugger like that sometimes."

He’s fuddled with drink still, but he knows one thing. No one in their right mind would ever come up with a lie like that. "You can see my memories, yes?"

"Yes. But only with your permission. If there’s something you don’t want me to see, imagine moving it out of my reach. If it makes you feel better, we can trade." A wicked smile creeps across her face. "You show me yours and I’ll show you mine."

"All right," he says, half-expecting to wake up any moment from some temporary drink-addled half-sleep. He has nothing to lose, after all.

He blinks once or twice to make sure that he is awake, then closes his eyes. The pads of her fingers caress his face again. He thinks of his sister, unconscious, but after a moment he can only picture her giggling at Spy vs Spy in the Mad magazines his father had brought home.

Then he sees a vast desert of blue tinged sands under a pale silver sky with three dark moons, what look like multi-sailed land yachts scudding towards him. His eyes snap open; hers are still shut. There’s a look of utter concentration on her face. "One of yours?" he asks in wonder. "Is that what it’s like out there?"

She smiles. "That’s not even the half of it."

He can feel her pick up and examine the terrible dreams he has had since Scully disappeared; the moment he had to face Mrs. Scully in a blood-stained apartment; the horror of that answering machine message — it’s like cracking open something in his chest and letting the grief pour out again.

"Shhh," she says, pulling him into a hug. His eyes burn with tears he’s trying to suppress. Her left hand goes to the back of his head, her index finger scritching up and down, a gentle soothing gesture.

Into his mind come images of Scully standing shoulder to shoulder with him in the Arctic; that wondrous first moment he thought he might have an ally, not a spy; of those times when she’d stood up for him no matter what the cost to her reputation; of trading arguments with her for the sheer joy of trying to guess what she’d say next. He saw her laughing in a graveyard, bedraggled and weary, but as exhilarated as he was.

And then, just as soon as it began, the tumble of memories is over, and he comes back to himself, like a swimmer beached after a long struggle to reach the shore. He is a little embarrassed to realise that he’s huddled against her, her arms warm around his back, his cheek pressed against her breastbone, the scent of vanilla body lotion in his nostrils. He can feel his brain slowing, quieting, as though the alcohol were actually working the way it is supposed to. Maybe he is kind of drunk: her heartbeat sounds doubled.

"I was hoping I would end up with my face here," he mutters into her cleavage, "though maybe not like this."

She gives a light slap to the back of his skull. "Oi. Don’t be lairy."

He sits up and gives her a slow smile. He’s so tired.

"Why don’t you lie down, sweetheart?" she says, unwrapping her arms from his back.

He does as she says. She pulls the covers aside and drapes them over him, and kneels beside the bed. "Maybe I’m hallucinating," he mumbles, pushing his face into the cool pillow. "Mysterious women don’t just happen along to help me."

"Oh, I’d get used to it if I was you, sunshine," she whispers.

His mouth opens to ask her why but her fingers swipe across his temples, his eyes shut and it doesn't seem so important any more. "When you wake up, all this will be in the back of the cupboard, where it can’t hurt you."

He wants to ask her what she means but he’s fallen too far down the rabbithole towards sleep.

There’s a quiet voice by his ear. "And let me tell you something else: don’t give up. You find your friend. And it’s going to be bloody awful a lot of the time, but the two of you? In the end? You win. You have a _fantastic_ life."

In his first dreams, he sees a mountainous land made of ice, and a wind-blown, joyous music so complex, crystalline and unearthly that he can barely process it. Something tells him it’s a song of hope. He feels the brush of lips against his forehead and the world winks out of existence.

* * *

A garbage truck is beeping outside his window. He blinks at the unexpected daylight and gazes muzzily at his watch, only to sit bolt upright when he realizes it’s almost midday. He swears a blue streak and calls his SAC, Dutton. To his surprise, the guy says he was only expecting Mulder to be in by 3pm. Apparently someone put him on a late detail with Johnson. Mulder feels about a million times better than he did yesterday, though he’s kind of worried that he left all the case notes strewn across the desk like that. He could swear he locked them away.

On his map there are lines drawn between the dump sites for the bodies, and the school where one suspect, James Joseph McNeill, has been working as a janitor. Johnson interviewed him last week. A post-it note with a big arrow and an exclamation point is plastered next to the street where McNeill lives. It doesn’t look much like his handwriting but whose else would it be?

He reads Johnson’s notes on McNeill again and something clicks in his head. He calls the ASAC again and by 1pm, a rumpled Mulder is with the rest of the team heading off to pick up McNeill from his house. Mulder is certain this is the guy. They might not save Angie O’Riley but they’ll save whoever would have been next.

When they get there, the guy has holed himself up in his basement. Mulder and Dutton are right outside and about to enter when Mulder hears the faintest scraping click and impelled by that sixth sense of his, shoves himself and his boss away from the door a second before the wood is shredded by a shotgun blast at chest height.

"Jesus H freaking Christ!" Dutton exclaims, knuckles white around his gun to stop the shakes as they both huddle back against brickwork. "Glad you were awake."

That rings faint bells in his brain. He breathes in deeply and shakes his head but nothing falls out of his memory.

They arrest McNeill, after a brief stand-off. Best of all, in a small room behind the furnaces they find Angie O’Riley, battered and bruised but clinging to life. He tells himself that that is enough — today he can almost believe it.

* * *

 **VII - Cheap tricks**

The last time Fox Mulder meets Donna Noble is the day before he dies.

"When you say it’s time, what do you mean?" he asks.

It’s the first time he can remember that she has dodged eye contact as they speak. "I wondered if you wanted to take a little trip. My way of saying thank you for saving me that time."

"That was thirty years ago," he says, taking his glasses off and pinching the bridge of his nose against an oncoming headache.

"Don’t suppose you’ve got a kettle, have you?

"You could’ve come to see me before now."

"I could make us both a brew."

"Which means there’s some reason you’re here now."

She turns and fiddles with the lock on the door of the mysteriously appearing closet. "I’d murder for a coffee; I’ve got a mouth like a camel’s flip-flop here."

That’s when it dawns on him why she is here. "Donna," he says, and it’s a demand and a plea all at once. He waits until she turns around and gives him the truth.

* * *

"I’m sorry; I’m so sorry," she says after she tells him, one hand rubbing circles of comfort into his back. They are sitting on his bed, just as they had the first time he met her. "But it’s peaceful, in your sleep. That’s not nothing."

He takes as deep a breath as he can these days. "It’s kind of a relief, actually. To know, I mean. Will’s got his own family and everyone I really know is gone." He ponders for a while, then says haltingly: "Are you some kind of angel of death?"

She laughs. "Are you barmy?" Then just as abruptly she stops. "Sorry, bit insensitive there. No I’m not. I just —" she pulls a face, waves a hand. "It’s complicated. I know stuff, about time."

"So you’re not here to kill me?"

She’s properly horrified. "No! What do you take me for?"

"I’m not the one who just said you were going to die!"

She considers for a moment. "All right, then. No, I don’t kill you. The reason I know you’re about to die is that I will turn up here tomorrow too late to see you."

"Seems like I’ll be the late one."

"Puns that bad will send you to hell, sunshine."

"Been there, done that. But how do you know to come tomorrow?"

"Glad you reminded me," she says, picking up a red pen from his desk and scrawling a cellphone number in inch-high letters across the bottom of his timeline, with the words ‘Amelia, please call this number’.

"Amelia finds this in your room tomorrow," she says. "And because she’s a good soul, she calls me. She was crying, by the way. That girl adores you."

He shakes his head in confusion. "Isn’t this all some kind of paradox?"

"Nah, more what a mate of mine would call a cheap trick," she says, one side of her mouth curling up into a smile.

"But why?" he asks.

"Because you once saved my life — more than once, actually — and I want to repay the favour." She takes in a deep breath. "You remember that time we met in London and I gave you a right mouthful because I thought you were some bloody nutcase?"

He does. At the time he was confused and disappointed as hell.

"I’d forgotten everything but I had your photo in my phone," she says. "When I checked the memory card folders I had lots of photos in my phone that I didn’t remember taking. He’d been so careful about wiping the numbers from the phone but he forgot the four gig card, the daft sod." She gives a bittersweet smile. "They triggered my memory. I was ill but my Grandad called the Doctor and we worked out a different way to save me. It just changed me, that’s all."

"Changed you? Changed you how?"

"Bit of a biological alteration."

"You’re part alien?" he asks in wonder, expecting her to laugh at him again.

Instead she smiles. "Sort of. Bit creeped out by that, but yeah."

"And you don’t travel with your friend any more?"

She shakes her head. "We had a philosophical disagreement about how people who ignore other people when they say ‘no’ deserve a smack. And these days I think I cramp his style with the young ‘uns. But the big idiot is family — we meet up for tea and a good bicker and I occasionally have to slap some sense into him."

Her face softens with affection. "And he helped me grow my ship." She strokes the surface of the door as though she can’t help herself.

"That’s a timeship?" he says, incredulous.

"Time and space. Backwards, forwards and way out there." Her grin is infectious. "Fancy a spin?"

"Why me? Of all the people in the universe?"

"Cause you’d love it as much as I do," she says, getting up and opening the door, her eyes bright with excitement. "Anywhere you like. Promise."

He looks at the tall, ornate wardrobe, with its eccentric sprawl of runes. It feels as though he could put a hand out and feel the power from it, like sensing the coiled tension in an animal that’s about to flee. Imagine travelling through time, to any place you wanted. Imagine seeing history from the front row, not some history book.

"Sure, but it’s going to be a tight squeeze," he replies, feeling foolish as he steps past her and…

"Holy. Shit."

She laughs.

* * *  
 **VII - Hello, Goodbye**

The past obliges Mulder with the kind of beautiful sunny spring day he remembers from childhood. He steps out to see white clouds scudding across a bowl of blue, hear the flapping of flags against the flagpoles and the clinking of glasses as black and white clad waiters lay out champagne flutes on trestle tables ready for the celebrations to come. If they spot that there are now two vending machines outside the gym block, no one pays it much mind. Nor do they notice when two people step out from the shadows nearby.

"All of time and space, and you pick 1990," she grumbles, but his attention is elsewhere.

"Oh, man, Bugles. And only fifty cents," says Mulder, pulling his spectacles out of his pocket to examine the contents of the real vending machine.

"Forty-five years back in time and all he cares about are snacks," Donna says, stroking the side of her ship. "Didn’t you see how cleverly she disguised herself? Proper working chameleon circuit, that is."

Mulder jangles the change in his pocket and pushes two quarters into the machine. But before he can press a button, her hand slams down to cancel his purchase. She plucks the coins out of the machine, and jabs a finger at the dates on the coins. "2014. 2031. You are not causing a temporal paradox just because you fancy some E numbers."

She hands the coins back and, darting a quick look around, she points something small and blue-lit at the machine’s controls. It chunters and groans and then the spiralling arms release a packet, which she fishes out for him. He grins. "I don’t think this is the kind of place you want to get caught stealing."

"Don’t get caught then, dumbo," she says. He stuffs the Bugles into his jacket pocket.

Right now, his old office is just four hundred feet away, though the younger version of himself isn't there, he's in California consulting on a ritual homicide and realizing that he doesn't give a damn about having a career.

Unlike the graduating class who are beginning to emerge into the courtyard with their families. Donna positions them by the drinks table and he picks up a glass of champagne, more to blend in than anything. He recognises instructors who taught him, men and women he hasn’t seen in decades. He picks out Skinner at the back of the throng — in his default setting of stern-faced overlord — and a wave of affection threatens to wash him over to talk to his old friend. Imagine how much pain he could prevent with a few words of warning.

Donna’s hand keeps him anchored in place. "You can’t," she says. "I explained the rules, didn’t I?"

"Are you reading my mind again?" he asks in irritation.

She shakes her head. "I just know what you’re thinking. My dad died of a heart attack. He was 59. You think I didn’t want to go to 2005 and tell him to test his flipping blood pressure?"

"Your dad was just an ordinary guy, right? What harm could it do? If it gave your dad a few years more?"

She squeezes her eyes shut for a second. "He died, so I went looking for the Doctor. Carpe diem and all that. And because of that — not being big-headed because it’s the truth — the universe changed. You can’t alter the course of your life either; too much depends on the journey you took."

Then suddenly she’s looking past his shoulder at the relieved faces of the graduates. She smiles. "But you can wave her off, if you like."

Later, he remembers the crowd parting for a moment to give him clear sight of Scully — a small, neat figure in an ugly brown suit that probably cost more than anything else in her wardrobe — as though she had been picked out by a shaft of sunlight piercing through cloud cover. It’s an illusion of memory, of course, but no less subjectively true for all that.

She’s talking to her mother and, Captain Scully having declined to pull the pole out of his ass for the afternoon, a brown-haired, open-faced guy who’s probably the brother he never met. It is the first time he has seen Scully for seven years. It’s like being kissed and punched in the throat all at the same time.

He’s tapping on her shoulder before he can even work out how he walked over there. She turns to face him, her dear face unlined and lit by an uncomplicated happiness.

"Jesus, you’re so young," he blurts out. Her eyebrows climb beneath her bangs.

"But then you all look so young to me," he goes on.

"Nice save," Donna whispers in his ear as she joins them, then plasters a polite for-public-consumption smile on her face and sips her champagne. She doesn’t trust him; she thinks he’ll be tempted to change history. She’s a good judge of character.

Scully’s mother and brother retreat to the drinks table so the newly minted agent can mingle.

"Congratulations, Doctor Scully. *Agent* Scully." He puts out his hand and, after a moment’s surprised hesitation she takes it.

"Thank you, sir," she says. "I’m sorry; have we met?"

He wonders what she sees. Probably just a tall, thin old man, stooped, gray and a little gnarl-fingered, with the kind of nose that you would call interesting if you were being kind. He shakes his head. "No," he says, "but I am sure we will. I’ve heard good things about you. Seen you around."

Her look of pleasure warms him through, makes him beam like a fool in return. He still hasn’t let go of her hand. He remembers the feeling of that hand in his; its strength despite its size, the papery warmth of the skin. She’s starting to pull away but he can’t quite release his grip. There’s a slight, painful pressure on his arthritic big toe. It’s from Donna’s foot pressing on his in a way which promises that the step could easily turn into a stamp, shortly to be followed by a kick in the ass. Her expression is pleasant but her eyes threaten dire consequences if he messes this up. He puts his hands in his pockets. "I’m a former agent," he says. "Occasionally, I lecture."

"Really, sir? What’s your name?"

"Mmm…" he begins. Donna shifts her weight onto his toe again. "Marty. John Marty." The pain eases and he glares at Donna. She gives him an innocent look and drinks her champagne.

"Well, Mr Marty," she says. "I hope to see you around. I’ll be based here, working in forensics. Pathology."

"You should consider field work," he says.

She looks taken aback, that familiar small crease appearing in her forehead as she assesses him, tries to work out what his angle is. "Well, of course, I’d like to, but I was hired —"

"Press for it," he interrupts. "Make some noise. Rattle some chains. Ask them. Because you’re going to be great at it."

"Thank you, sir," she says, puzzled, wariness taking over at this stranger who appears to know all about her. He wants to put her mind at ease but he has no idea how. He’s said too much.

"Come on, Agent Marty," says Donna, threading her arm through his. "Time to go."

He plasters a smile on his face, holds out his hand again, and shakes hers for the last time. "Good luck, Agent Scully."

A thousand tiny tells he picked up from loving her for years let him know that she’s relaxing at the thought that this odd conversation is almost over, though to the outside eye she remains cheerful and polite. "Thank you. Good to meet you, sir," she says, and is turning back to find her mother and brother before he has even stepped away.

Donna gives him a tight smile and raises her eyebrows in the universal gesture of ‘are you okay?’ He nods. His chest starts to ache, as though something is swelling in there, threatening to crawl up into his throat and seal off the air supply. He’s almost at the door of the hidden timeship before he recognises that feeling for what it is: immense happiness at seeing her one last time, and suffocating grief for exactly the same reason.

  
* * *  
 **VIII - A flexible concept**

The control room of the timeship is disappointingly unlike the deck of the Enterprise. It’s more like a cosy sitting room, albeit one with a crystalline glass control column sprouting in the centre of it, surging up and down and splitting the light like some altar to the God of prisms.

The walls are stone, with circular indentations at regular intervals. High up, there are narrow stained glass windows which cast yet more jewelled light in kalaeidoscope patterns across the thick rugs on the floor. There’s an open fire in one corner — fake but it pours out warmth — two huge armchairs beside it, and on the other side of the control console, a vast kitchen table half-covered with what looks like the innards of the large hadron collider and way too many dirty coffee mugs.

He nurses a mug of coffee at the clean end of the table. Donna is casting that strange, knowing look at him, as she warms her hands on a mug of her own. He’s torn open the pack of Bugles and they’re crunching them off their fingertips like kids.

"I had to stop going to see grandad after a few decades. At some point I was going to end up meeting myself. Imagine if I was wearing the same dress as me — I’d have to slap myself. How embarrassing would that be?"

He gives a watery smile for the watery joke.

"It got too hard," Donna says, serious now. "Slicing up time into smaller and smaller slivers so I wouldn’t cause a paradox; making sure I left before I arrived again; working out how long he and mum had left; how much I could say, how much I couldn’t. Trying to stay linear. It got too hard."

He reaches over and squeezes her hand. She gives a grateful smile and taps the side of her head. "But they’ll be up here, always. And at least I got to show my grandad alien worlds."

"But what do you do with all that time you have? Don’t you get lonely?"

"There’s so much beauty out there. Places to see, things to do, wrongs to put right. I used to work in an office — dogsbodying for some suit. How can I be ungrateful that my best mate gave me time and the universe?" She sounds wistful nonetheless.

"So what now? Do you drop me back home so I can have that quiet death tomorrow?"

To his surprise, he’s at peace with the idea. He’s had hard times, impossible times really, but in the end she was right. He had a fantastic life.

She looks him in the eye and smiles. "You know, tomorrow is kind of a flexible concept when you’ve got a time machine. It can be years away.

"What do you reckon to seeing the stars?"

* * *  
End

**Author's Note:**

> • This came when I was reading the prompts on, of all things, an LJ X-Files ficathon. Someone wanted Donna Noble/Fox Mulder, redheads. And I thought "that's just stupid, it would never work". Only the more I thought about it, the more it did, though not in the spirit of that particular event. If you're reading, anon prompter, I apologise, and thank you.
> 
> • This was finished and beta-read with help from SEP, Anjou, Cofax, Kirbyfest and Shaye. Thank you. All remaining errors are my own.
> 
> [Written late 2008 - Feb 2009]


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